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First up, this game app: “Kill Santa Claus,” created by some company called ChipPOW and available through Amazon. Apparently, it encourages players to take revenge for bad or missing gifts by shooting Santa Claus.

The description of game play seriously needs a grammar and syntax intervention:

Kill Christmas old man!

Santa Claus did not bring you a gift dreams? Behaves like rudolph! Start the game Kill Santa Claus as a snowball! Shoot on target! This pathetic old holly is not going anywhere from a sniper rifle rudolph! Try role grinch, destroy Christmas!

Each year promises rudolph gifts, only they do not! Hatred grew as snowball. Shoot to destroy all the Santa Claus! Suggests sight and tap on the shot. Your timer is 5 minutes to clean the territory grinch. You have to win the game Kill Santa Claus!

How old were killed – see on the screen, there statistics rudolph. Take care of snowball cartridges and do not shoot into the air. Aim, shoot and then holly. So you can do away with the silly holiday Christmas!

One user gave the game a single star and declared they were deleting the game.

For the record, my surreal science fiction novel Kill Claus! does not involve shooting Santa with any sort of firearm. So the game is not technically the result of plagiarism. However, I’d like to think the app grew out of a superficial glance at the title of my book.

As a shameless plug, Kill Claus! is still available on Amazon and Lulu as both a eBook and paperback. The eBook can be downloaded for a mere $1.99 from either site. On Lulu, the paperback costs $13.50. As for the Amazon paperback, you can choose between two price points, either 15 bucks, or $609.11!

I love seeing these inflated prices on my books. It’s just further proof that when you put something out in the world, it takes on a life of its own.

Goofing around on Amazon today, I noticed they are offering copies of my book Savage Night and Other Stories for only $4.41. That’s a huge discount on the $19.99 list price! What a great opportunity to grab a copy if you’re interested. Check it out here.

This book collects a bunch of my early experimental science fiction stories alongside my early science fiction novel Savage Night, which uses the Ancient Egyptian myth of crossing the Land of the Dead to describe a journey into the self. Thematically, everything here seems to follow the classic sex or death duality, often at the same time.

Not sure how many they have at this price. I would buy them all, but I still have a couple big boxes of them from the last time I saw the price drop. After my royalty payment, I got copies for a buck each.

Although the back cover synopsis is available on the listing, here it is anyway:

Two books in one this collection includes a short novel Savage Night and a group of stories exploring similar themes of death control self actualization and the conflict between the socialized self and the True or inner self. In Savage Night, Jean Savage is a crew member on an industrial ship forced to land on a desolate planet so its parent corporation can form an alliance with the ultimate enforcers of control the serpent headed demons of the Duat, a nocturnal underworld the Ancient Egyptians visualized in their funereal text The Book of Coming into Day. Not content to own the bodies of its employees, the RA corporation wants to exploit their souls as well In the Duat there are no enemies of RA. Not anymore. Fighting a guerilla war using sex magic rituals and protective spells, Jean struggles against the corporation and its demon allies to keep her true self alive until the dawn that brings escape. But her biggest challenge is finding her own soul her True Self ,which has been lost in layers of social psychological and corporate control.

“Other Stories” features two early Jean Savage texts exploring similar themes in different contexts where she is a juvenile delinquent struggling against the hostile influences of family and society. There are also stories involving killer clowns spreading a bizarre sex virus, pirates seeking immortality in deep space, a trio of eco terrorist mermaids, and the gingerbread man as a computer hacker. Using black humor, social satire, violent eroticism, science fiction motifs, and experimental narrative structures, these compelling yarns perform themselves in the cinema of the mind s eye.

It still amuses me to think of the time I bought 100 copies of my own book, Savage Night and Other Stories, for $1 each on Amazon. Looking back at my Amazon orders, this was on April 1, 2011.

I caught the sale at the right time. Amazon was listing my book for $3. I assume they had warehoused a few stock copies due to the success of my earlier book, Mondo DC. Now they had unsold copies to get rid of. On a whim, I placed an order for my own book, requesting 100 copies. I had to order the books in batches of 33, with one batch of a single copy. I figured they would cut me off based on the number they actually had in stock. But no.

They sent me 100 copies of Savage Night.

For me, this was a no-brainer. Kind of. My royalty rate on Xlibris, where I had self-published Savage Night, was $2 per copy. So eventually I got a check from them covering two thirds of the price I paid Amazon. My net cost was $1 a copy.

Of course I have roughly 98 copies of the book left in my house. If anyone wants one, let me know. I’m sure we can work out a fair price.

This actually happened a second time in May 2015 with the second book I published through Xlibris, Spells of Coming Day. Amazon listed the book for $4, and I tried to order 100 copies. However, the bookseller had learned their lesson. I was only able to buy 4 copies at the reduced price. Of course, I still have those sitting in my house.

Every now and then, I check the Amazon listings for my books. I haven’t seen any big sales lately. But it’s remarkable how many third party sellers are offering my titles, usually at prices far higher than either Amazon or Lulu list them. I’d like to know how that’s supposed to work. But in some way, it’s flattering to think that someone listed my book in their catalog, hoping to make a little bread. I’m sure it’s a win-win for them: if one sells, they just have to order it from Lulu (or Xlibris or AuthorHouse) and then send it out, reaping big profits.

Since I rarely see any royalties from my own books, I guess they aren’t selling too many copies. Somehow, it all seems like a commentary on today’s publishing industry.